Fiery Rivers

by Daefyd Williams

  “Watcha thinkin’?” she asked coquettishly. She had noticed Lemuel looking at her mouth.

  “What? Oh . . . nothin’. I was just watchin’ how much you like your food.”

  Gwen made a purring sound in her throat, licked her lips, and then stuck her thumb into her mouth and sucked it while she pulled it out slowly. “I do like to eat,” she grinned.

  Lemuel got an instant erection. “You do?” he asked hopefully.

  “I do,” she said, as she reached over and began caressing his hand. “Why don’tchou pay the check while I finish eatin’, an’ I’ll show ya.”

  Lemuel demurred. “Um, I can’t right now.” He pulled his hand away from hers and placed both of his hands on the seat of the leather banquette, which was smooth and cool. “I’ll do it in a coupla minutes.”

  Gwen giggled. “Do you weewee wike me dat much?” she asked in a childish voice as she caressed her full mouth with a napkin. She placed the napkin on her plate. Lemuel looked at it and could see the last vestiges of her lipstick on it.

  He turned to face the window to get his mind off her mouth and saw his reflection in the glass against the darkness of the parking lot. Across from him sat a very fat, very black girl that he wanted very badly. “Umm, I guess I do, yeah,” he replied. “Yvonne would kill me if she knew who I was with,” he thought.

  On the way home, she told him to pull into a dark corner of a Kmart parking lot where there were no cars. As soon as he had turned off the ignition, she said, “And now for dessert.” She unzipped his pants and slowly took him out. It was slightly difficult because he was so hard. She moved her head into his lap. He rested his hands on top of her head. Her hair was stiff and kinky.

  “So this is what it’s like,” he thought. He was able to enjoy it for only a few minutes. After it was over, she placed his penis back into his underwear and zipped up his pants. She brought her lips close to his ear and whispered, “I swallowed you.”

  “You did?” he asked, incredulously. He had never conceived of a girl doing that. He had never progressed that far in his fantasies. “What’s it like?” he inquired.

  With her right hand, she gently turned his face toward hers to kiss him. Lemuel, repulsed, quickly turned his head to look out the side window.

  “What?” she questioned, obviously hurt. “It’s OK for me to take you into my mouth and swallow it, but not OK for you to taste it?”

  He turned back to her. “I . . . I never tasted it before.” Her breath smelled rubbery, not unpleasant, just a smell he had never smelled before. He kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were very soft and very large. An image of a snake defecating that he had once seen at the Columbus Zoo zoomed into his consciousness. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and she sucked it, hard. She pulled away and pecked him on the nose.

  “You better take me home now, white boy,” she said. “I don’t wanta piss off Daddy any more than he already is.”

  “Why is he pissed?” Lemuel asked innocently.

  “Because he don’t like me datin’ white boys, but I like white boys,” she said.

  “Oh,” Lemuel said. “Jesus, I’m not her first. I hope I didn’t catch some kinda disease,” he thought, panicking.

  When he pulled in front of her house, she kissed him again. Still the rubbery smell. “Will you call me again?” she asked. There was a tone in her voice, almost a plea for help.

  Lemuel had no intention of seeing her again. He was afraid of her. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She gave him one last peck on the mouth. “See ya soon.” She got out of the car and walked jauntily up her walk and onto the front porch. She turned and waved before she entered the house. He waved back.

  On the way home, he was ecstatic. “I can’t fuckin’ believe she swallowed it,” he thought. “What a whore.” He knew he would see her again.

  He began seeing her as often as he could. He would call her whenever Yvonne had to study for a test, or attend a club meeting, or practice for a play after school. Gwen asked him why he always called her the same day that he wanted to see her. He explained that he was involved in after-school sports and was too tired to call when he got home, and those days that he did call were days on which practice had been cancelled. She seemed to believe him.

  Their lovemaking included intercourse whenever Gwen’s father was not at home. Lemuel discovered that one of his greatest pleasures was to hold Gwen’s legs in the air by her ankles to form a black, fleshy “V” and watch himself penetrate her. He loved the contrast of white skin disappearing into blackness. He had been seeing her for six months when he made the mistake of telling Jim that he was doing what he had suggested in the locker room. He was at first doubtful, but after Lemuel described the details of their lovemaking and told him about Gwen’s alcoholic father threatening him, he believed him. Before he had told Jim, he had made him swear that he would tell no one. He had agreed.

  It was a week before Yvonne confronted him, and three weeks before she told him that it was over between them. His plan of having Gwen as a backup did not work out either. He was embarrassed to be seen in public with her. It wasn’t so much that she was fat—she was black, and he was acutely aware of the disapproving looks and whispers that went on whenever he was with her. He tried to let her down as gently as he could by telling her that he needed to date other people—he was feeling trapped only seeing her.

  She did not let him go easily. She began calling his house every day until his father told him that if she did not stop calling, he would not allow him to play football next year. He finally told her that he had found someone else, Yvonne, and that she should do the same. She had called a few times after that, but he began slamming down the phone whenever he heard her voice, and the calls finally stopped. He never saw her again.

  Lemuel came into the house through the back door. He walked past Rennie, who was applying a decal to the wing of an airplane at his desk. “You get a lot done, Daddy?” he inquired.

  “Worked hard on one,” he mumbled. He went into the bathroom, closed the door and chuckled to himself at his witty remark, which he knew no one would get. Rennie was so busy with his models and comics that he never seemed to notice anything. “When I was his age,” he mused, “I was jerkin’ off all the time to the Sears catalogue. They were some fine bitches in their panties and bras.” He dropped his sweat-drenched tee shirt, overalls, and underwear into the green-and-white hamper in front of the toilet, slid the shower curtain to the left and stepped into the shower. He adjusted the water so that it was almost cool and began to lather his chest and underarms with a bar of soap.

  Rennie finished applying the decal to the wing, left the plane on his desk, and returned to his bed and the comic book. He was very close to his mother. His father was always at the factory working, tinkering on go-karts in the garage, or lying flat on his back, drunk, in the front yard. Consequently, he and his mother had been alone in the house most of the time until Angela had been born. Lemuel emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a blue bath towel and went into the master bedroom opposite the bathroom. He came out a few minutes later in a torn grey robe, switched on the television, turned the dial to channel seven, and eased himself into his overstuffed chair in front of the window beside the sofa, on which Leona sat crocheting.

  Angela looked up at him and smiled. He waved for her to come to him and patted his lap. She carefully closed the scrapbook of cats, placed The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and the paste and scissors on top of it, and then shoved it under the telephone stand close to the front door, on the top shelf of which sat a black dial telephone on a white crocheted doily.

  She climbed onto his lap and turned to face him. He cradled her in his arms like a mother nestles a newborn. He gazed lovingly into her large blue eyes as the theme song for Bonanza galloped into the room. She began to twirl a strand of her fine, blond hair with her left index finger and suck her right thumb as she stared lovingly into his b
loodshot eyes.

  “I just love that Hoss,” Leona stated. “He’s just a big ol’ bear. Makes you just wanta hug him an’ pinch his cheeks.” She had placed her crocheting on the arm of the sofa when the show began. Now she used the faded arm as a back support and draped her legs across the length of the sofa, carefully arranging her dress so that only her ankles and feet were visible. Her back was to Lemuel and Angela. “Rennie!” she called down the hallway. “Bonanza’s on!”

  “OK!” he called back. He came into the room and sat cross-legged on the carpet next to her. She stroked the back of his neck with a delicate white hand.

  Angela began to make soft grunts synchronized with the beating of her heart as she stared with wide open blue eyes into the bleary eyes of her father. Lemuel’s face softened as he continued to gaze into her eyes. His heart began to beat in tandem with hers. Neither she nor he broke the contemplation of each other. Lemuel felt something give in his chest, like a peony bursting merrily open in the spring. He had always felt connected to Angela in a way he had never felt with his son, but this was something new, a deepening warmth that began in the center of his chest and moved outward into his arms, head, and legs. He knew that she felt it also, as she had stopped grunting and simply stared into his eyes, a slight smile on her lips.

  A blue light like a halo began to pulse from them, filling the room, mundane objects fading in the brilliance of the blue. As they continued to gaze into each other’s eyes, the blue turned to white and the pulses increased. Only Angela’s face remained visible to Lemuel, her beautiful face, framed by her fine, blond hair, pillowed on billows of brilliant white. Lemuel felt a tingling in the tips of his fingers. He had never experienced such ecstasy, such contentment, such rapture.

  Leona glanced over at Lemuel and Angela during a Brylcreem commercial and saw them gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. An icy lance of fear thrust into her stomach, and she jumped up and grabbed Angela by the hand and said, “It’s past your bedtime, young lady.” The concentric rings of white light that had been emanating from them evanesced as though a light switch had been flicked off. Leona made the sign for “bed” and pointed to the door of her bedroom.

  “Fuck you!” Lemuel thought. He hugged Angela, and she kissed him on the cheek. Then she hugged Rennie and went into the bedroom with her mother. Neither Leona nor Rennie had been aware of the concentric rings of white light, the epicenter of which had been Lemuel and Angela, alone in their mutual bliss.

  Hoss and Little Joe were pinned down behind some boulders just outside Virginia City. Bullets were zinging around them, and they were close to running out of ammunition when Pa and Adam arrived and overpowered the bad guys, who were led by a neighboring rancher who was incensed that the Cartwrights had stolen a thousand acres of his ranch. Pa made him realize that the sale of the land had been legitimate, and he agreed to allow the rancher’s cattle to continue to graze on the land. The rancher grudgingly agreed that Pa was right and thanked him for being so generous to a poor rancher like him. They shook hands to seal the deal. End of show. A commercial of a beautiful blonde riding in a convertible and a male voice repeating “Dippity-do” came on. Lemuel got up and switched off the television. “Time for bed, son.”

  “OK, Daddy.” Rennie stood up and sauntered down the hallway to his bedroom.

  “Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

  “I won’t.”

  Lemuel went into the bathroom and relieved himself one last time before calling it a day. Then he went into the bedroom, turned on the ceiling fan, removed his robe, and lay down naked on the bed on top of the bedspread. He began to drift off to sleep. Black women in white robes followed him down a dirt path winding among majestic trees. He was going to teach them how to ride a bike. In a glade still illuminated by the setting sun, he approached a gleaming, golden bicycle and wiped the handlebars off with his hands. Motes of golden dust floated away, dipping and ascending like breakers rolling toward a distant and unknown shore. He motioned to one of the women to come towards the bike. A heavyset woman touched him gently on the back of the hand. “Gwen!” he said, smiling. “I didn’t know you were interested in sailin’.”

  “Oh, yes,” she purred. “Ever since I’ve been eating Goop, I’ve been stationed on the poop deck, keeping a close watch on the capstan for the captain.”

  “Well, this is how you do it,” he stated. “You hop on the seat, plant your heels firmly on top o’ the handlebars and lower your ass until we can just see the white bicycle seat juttin’ between your thighs. Then you move by—.”

  “Lem. Lemuel,” Leona whispered in his ear. “Are you asleep?”

  Lemuel grunted and turned away from her on his left side towards the wall. “Was.”

  She removed her clothes and lay down beside him. She wrapped her right arm around him, nuzzled his neck, and softly whispered, “Lem, since it’s our anniversary, I thought we might celebrate.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” Lemuel thought. “I just came an hour ago.” A witty repartee by Sonny one night at Smitty’s entered his thoughts: “I wouldn’t touch ‘er with your dick.” He smiled in the dark and gruffly said, “I’m too tired. Maybe tomorrow.”

  Leona pulled away and lay on her right side at the edge of the bed, as far away from him as she could and still be in the same bed. She got up, opened the closet door, took a silk nightgown off a clothes hanger, put it on, and lay back down. She pulled the sheet up to her neck, lay again on her right side, and stared in the dark at the closet.

  “Ain’tchou gonna get hot?” Lemuel asked.

  “I’m fine,” she replied coldly. Warm tears streamed down her cheeks onto the pillowcase. She was determined not to let Lemuel know she was crying. Her insides felt as though they were being pried open with a can opener. “One day,” she thought, “one day outa the year you could do what I want. Mom had been right.” She hated to admit it, but her relationship had become as her mother had predicted. She had told her not to marry someone who was not a churchgoer. She had anyway, and now she was married to a drunk whose only purpose was to bring pain into her life. “Jesus, deliver me from this evil,” she silently prayed. “Save Lemuel’s soul so we can be happy.” She wondered again why he had ever married her. He had been the quarterback on the football team and the most popular boy in school. He could have had his pick of any of the popular, pretty girls. She had never been popular. She had gotten good grades and almost made valedictorian, but she knew boys were not attracted to her. She had not gone to a single dance or attended any of the proms. She had been reconciled to living her life alone when, out of the blue, Lemuel had started talking to her. She had never understood why. When she asked him, he had always told her that he liked her brains. But she knew that he had never told her the real reason. She would probably never know. She hugged her breasts and turned onto her back, away from the wetness on the pillow. She sighed.

  Lemuel, now wide awake, stoked the embers of his anger by reflecting on how he had come to marry this woman. The only reason he had begun talking to Leona was that he had noticed that she had full lips, like Gwen’s. He had dated other girls after Yvonne had dumped him, but none had Gwen’s full lips. It was only after they were married that he discovered that Leona thought oral sex was an abomination. “A bestial act, and not befitting the sanctity of the marital relationship,” she had succinctly put it.

  “If I’da known that before I married ‘er, I wouldn’t’ve. Not suck?! How stupid!” he thought. Not only was he not interested in making love without oral sex, he also did not want to bring another defective child like Angela into the world. He loved her, but he always imagined how much more wonderful and deep their relationship would be if they could genuinely talk to each other. But there was no way he could communicate with her. He was too old to learn sign language, so his only communication with her was through Leona.

  “If Leona hadn’ta come from poor stock, Angela woulda been normal,” he confirmed to himself for the thousandth time. In
her family, she had a retarded first cousin, two deaf nephews, and her sister, Tenny, and her husband, Jacob, also had a retarded daughter, Cilla. “I shoulda stayed with Gwen,” he concluded. “People be damned!” He remembered the first time she had made love to him in the car. “If I’da only known all women weren’t like that. If I’da only known.” He sighed softly with regret. He listened to Leona breathing deeply. She was asleep. He eased his hand between his legs and held himself. It was some comfort. He drifted down into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 2

  The gravel-coated macadam road was restless. Small bubbles of tar squeezed their way to the surface of the road between the small stones, glistening in the sunlight like the black eyes of a reptile. A bicycle rolled down the highway bursting the eyes, and the reptile, sightless, subsided once more into its dreamless sleep.

  Rennie had slept well. After watching Bonanza, he had finished reading the Superman comic book, brushed his teeth and gone to bed, leaving the fan atop the mahogany bureau rotating slowly all night, so he was constantly laved with a cool breeze in the muggy Ohio night, up his body, down his body, up his body, down his body. He had slept on top of the bedclothes in his underwear and tee shirt.

  Now he made a game of seeking out the black bubbles in the road and running over them with his bike. He always felt proud when he was riding his bike, for it had all the things that other kids envied, especially the Hensley boys. Black-and-white plastic streamers hung from the handlebar grips, a large headlight was affixed to the middle of the handlebar, and a small red taillight sat atop the rear fender, both of which could be illuminated by placing a small generator against the rear wheel. He had the only ten-speed bike in the neighborhood.

  He turned left from Pennyroyal Road onto Marcella Drive. Just before he turned, he glanced to the right, to the small pond that lay beside a white clapboard house on Roberts Drive. A weedy four-foot embankment surrounded it, and the water lay yellow and still in the early morning sunlight. He wondered why it had no green scum floating on it, as most stagnant ponds did. He rounded the dogleg turn on Marcella, rode past the Brower house, turned left into the Hensleys’ dirt driveway and squeezed the handbrakes hard, skidding to a stop and stirring up a cloud of dust. A brown-and-white dog bounded over the back porch toward him, barking ferociously. He pushed down the kickstand and left the bike standing in the middle of the driveway. “Dukie! Stop! It’s me, Rennie.” The dog immediately ceased barking, began wagging its tail, and eagerly approached him. Rennie knelt down to scratch the dog behind its ears. “That’s a good boy, Dukie. How come you barkin’ at me, huh?” He stood up to avoid being licked in the face and walked to the back door. He peered inside the screen door. “Mornin’, Miss Hensley.”